Raspberry Pi has announced that two partners, RS Components (Allied Components in North America) and element14, are now taking orders for multiple units. Buyers can order as many units as they need, which is an important milestone. The previous one-unit-per-person limit made it difficult for businesses and non-profits to acquire as many units as they’d like.

Pricing for a Type B board is listed at $35 dollars on the Allied Components website and about £25 pounds on the RS Components website. However, orders are likely to total a fair bit more after the purchase of accessories (such as a flash card with the Raspberry Pi operating system or an enclosure) and pay for shipping.

The Raspberry Pi foundation has stated that over 4,000 boards are being produced per day. Despite that, RS Components is currently listing a lead time of 11 weeks. At the time of this writing, element14’s order process is overloaded and has been temporarily taken down.

It’s clear that the Raspberry Pi has been a hit and removing the quantity restriction will open them up to even more customers. Those wanting to buy one will have to be patient, however. It doesn’t look like order turnaround will improve any time soon.

Has anyone successfully used Raspberry Pi to build a cluster? I know it's difficult to build an ARM cluster, but I've seen some people have done it with PandaBoards using Ubuntu 12.04. I suspect it should be possible to do the same with Debian (which Raspberry Pi can run).

Duh. I forgot about the quantity restrictions. Thanks Matt. I'm trying to decide whether to build a cluster with ARM or with Intel. ARM definitely gives you more Megaflops/s per watt, while it seems Intel gives you more Megaflops/s per dollar (not counting, of course, operation cost). I plan on building a cluster for a Bachelor's project. Trying to keep it as cheap as possible while also making sure I have the necessary processing power.